Following a day or two to get settled and rehearse, they give their first concert of the tour on Thursday (August 24) in Frankfurt at the Rheingau Musik-Festival. Their itinerary also includes Hamburg (for the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival), the Bonn Beethovenfest, the Musikfest Berlin, three concerts at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland and two performances at the BBC Proms in London through September 4.

The heart of this tour's music is Beethoven, which was a focus of the orchestra's 2005-06 programming in Philadelphia. Eschenbach will be conducting his musicians in Beethoven's First, Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies, in various combinations with Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, Matthias Pintscher's H_rodiade-Fragmente, and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Featured in the Pintscher will be soprano Marisol Montalvo, who gave a spectacular performance of the piece in Philadelphia last winter; the soloists in the Mahler cycle will be mezzo-soprano Mihoko Fujimura (replacing the previously scheduled Matthias Goerne) and tenor Nikolai Schukoff.

More information on the tour, and on the Philadelphia Orchestra's upcoming concert season at home and at Carnegie Hall in New York City, is available at www.philorch.org.